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Manga Review: “QQ Sweeper” Volume Two

QQ Sweeper Volume 2 focuses on Kyutaro Horikita and Fumi Nishioka. Kyutaro is a cleaning expert at Kurokado High, and he comes across Fumi while she’s sleeping at school. Kyutaro is a “Sweeper,” and has the responsibility of cleaning away negative energy from people’s hearts. Fumi becomes his apprentice.

Volume 2 sees Kyutaro tormented by a girl he knew as a child who disappeared. Whenever he sees Fumi, he keeps seeing memories of Fuyu, the girl who disappeared. Much of this volume focuses on the struggle of how conflicted Kyutaro feels about this. On the one hand, he can’t believe Fumi and Fuyu could be the same, yet there appear to be clues that seem to indicate that the two girls are the same person. I think that Motomi handled this aspect well, and I thought it worked to make it a running theme throughout this volume.

Meanwhile, the reader learns that Fumi is trying to hide her past from Kyutaro and his family. Unfortunately, the secret of her past catches up to her when she is attacked by another student at Kurokado High. Kyutaro and his family don’t judge her for her past, and they try to help her use it to aid her in her work as a Sweeper apprentice.

We also get to see Fumi as she helps Kyutaro perform Sweeper duties when they need to clean away the negative energy from the student that attacked her. I thought this made a great test for Fumi, because I can image how hard it must be for her to have to help someone who had tried to kill her earlier. But I think it goes to show that an important part of being a Sweeper is the fact that they have to try to not think about those kinds of issues when they perform their duties. It seems that they do the job they have to do, no matter what complications may be involved.

When it comes to the art, Motomi seems to use an art style that looks pretty similar to what she used for her Dengeki Daisy series. But one thing that stood out to me was how Motomi depicted how Kyosuke remembers seeing Fuyu when he has his memories from his childhood. There’s something almost “ethereal” about the look that Fuyu is given in those memories, and perhaps she went for this dream-like quality in order to easily convey to the audience that what’s being seen is a flashback. However, there is one thing that bothers me about the character design, and it’s the fact that Kyutaro and Koichi look a little too similar. Sometimes I found myself getting the two characters mixed up when I saw them in this volume.

QQ Sweeper Volume 2 will most likely appeal to shojo manga readers who also enjoy supernatural elements. While this volume makes it clear that this series has a love story at its core, there’s also a strong emphasis on the supernatural. This volume will be best appreciated by readers who have already read the first volume and liked what they read.